The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown

11

The first elevator, with the numbers 1 through 20 arrayed above it, was maybe twenty yards beyond the front desk, with its more ambitious fellow right alongside it. Then there was a stretch of wall space, filled in part by a painting by the long-lost bastard son of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, and then, far enough from its fellows so you wouldn’t choose it by mistake, was the discreetly unlabeled private elevator that went straight to the penthouse.

I pushed the button for Door #2. It opened without a sound, we entered just as silently, and it closed even as I pressed 29.

Carolyn, her lips moving no more than those of a promising ventriloquist-in-training, said, “Ishan Horbat?”

“Istvan Horvath,” I said, “and I forget what he did and does, but he can look forward to a long and luxurious life, provided he doesn’t try to go back to Croatia.”

“Therezh really suzha person, Bern?”

“There is,” I said, “and he owns Apartment 29-D, but he wouldn’t have picked up the phone if the concierge had called, because I guess he prefers spring to fall.”

“Huh?”

“He’s spending October in Buenos Aires, where I understand it’s lovely this time of year, but then so is Manhattan. And there’s no camera in the elevator, and even if there was I don’t think Peter-Peter has lip-reading down pat, so you can talk normally.”

“Oh,” she said, normally enough, and the whisper-quiet elevator stopped as imperceptibly as it started, and the door opened, and we stepped out on the 29th floor.

The elevator, given the slightest encouragement, would have whisked us all the way to 41, just a single flight of stairs below the Kloppmann Diamond. But even without closed-circuit assistance, the front desk afforded a good view of the elevator, and the numbers above it that indicated where it was. I’d read Blue Moon, and found it admirably fast-paced and gripping, but that didn’t mean young Peter might not want to reassure himself that Mr. Horvath and his lady friend had in fact gone where they were supposed to be.

I’d say the hallway was empty, but I’d be slighting the potted plants stationed here and there, and the generic abstract canvases on the walls. But there were no human beings, and of course no cameras, and I found the D apartment and rang the bell, just to make sure.

When no one answered it, I took out my set of tools. The lock was a Rabson, and about as pickproof as locks got before the current generation of electronic sentinels, but the inner workings of a Rabson lock are as familiar to me as my own apartment. I let us in almost as swiftly as I could have done with Mr. Horvath’s key, flicked the light switch, and ushered Carolyn inside.

“You’re glowing, Bern.”

“Glowing?”

She nodded.” Positively radiant. It really does it for you, doesn’t it?”

“Even after all these years,” I admitted, “and God knows how many locked doors. All I have to do is let myself in where I don’t belong and I get the same thrill I got the very first time I did it.”

“When you were just a boy.”

“A good little boy,” I said, “in all other respects. I wonder if Istvan Horvath has ever had the pleasure himself.”

“Of breaking and entering?”

“Of seeing the inside of his apartment.”

“It’s all furnished, Bern. Pretty luxuriously, in fact.”

“But pretty generically, wouldn’t you say?”

“Like he picked a decorator out of a phone book and handed him an AmEx card. No, you know what it looks like?”

“What?”

“Like the building staged it,” she said. “You know how they do on the Flip or Flop shows? On HGTV? Where you buy some pigsty of a house—”

“But one with good bones.”

“Right, good bones. Because the last thing you’d want is a house with osteoporosis. And what you do, you rip out a few walls and spring for a new roof and build an enormous island in the kitchen, or maybe an archipelago. And then, before you have your open house, you hire a company to stage it, because a nicely furnished place has more eye appeal than empty rooms and bare walls.”

“If I were selling condos to rich people,” I said, “I might do that. If I’m asking upwards of a million dollars for an apartment, paying a couple of thousand to have it staged wouldn’t be out of line.”

“Not at all.”

“And the buyer, if all he wants is an investment in New York real estate and a place where he’ll spend maybe three weeks a year—”

“‘This looks nice, Mr. Real Estate Agent. How much more for the furniture?’”

“There you go,” I said. “Or maybe, ‘You vhant two million six for this? Okay, but for zat you got to trow in ze furniture. So vhat do you say? Haff ve got a deal?’”

She gave me a look.

“What?”

“The accent. The same one you trotted out for Peter-Peter. Is that supposed to be Croatian?”

“I don’t really know what a Croatian accent would sound like,” I said. “I was just trying for all-purpose foreign.”

“Well, in that case I have to say you nailed it. Now what, Bern?”

“Now we make ourselves at home,” I said, and took out the two pairs of blue hospital gloves. “We’ll give Peter some time to forget us, and let other people have a turn on the elevator. And I don’t honestly think anybody’s going to dust this apartment for fingerprints, but let’s not leave any. Just in case.”

We spent a long half hour in 29-D. It was a large one-bedroom apartment, with views south and west, and an abundance of empty drawers and closets and kitchen cabinets argued for Horvath’s never having spent a night here.

In the bedroom, Carolyn kicked off her shoes and stretched out on the queen-size bed. “If they staged the place,” she said, “they didn’t cut corners. They went with down pillows and sheets with a high thread count.”

“You look like you’re settling in for a nap.”

“I’m tired enough. There’s something exhausting about adjusting to a new universe.”

“No kidding.”

“But there’s something invigorating about it, too. So I’m tired and wired at the same time.” She put her arms over her head and stretched, in a manner that looked familiar.

“Oh,” I said.

“Huh?”

“The way you were stretching just now. It reminded me of something, and it took me a minute to figure out what.”

“Raffles, right? Or just about any cat, they all do it, but it’s Raffles you’d have been reminded of.”

Sure, that must be it, I could have said.

But what I said was, “Actually, it was a photograph I saw ages ago. It was probably around the time I first let myself into somebody else’s residence.”

“‘One Burglar’s Beginnings.’”

“Something like that.”

“When you were at an impressionable age.”

“Evidently.”

“I don’t suppose it was a picture of a cat.”

“A woman,” I said. “She was, you know, stretching.”

“Stre-e-e-etching.”

“And the expression on her face was a lot like the expression on yours just now.”

“Oh?” Her expression was different now, and hard to read. “Uh, what was she wearing, Bern?”

Oh, God.

“As a matter of fact, she wasn’t wearing anything.”

“You don’t say. Who was she, Bern?”

“Just a woman in a photograph.”

“Just a woman in a photograph,” she echoed. And, as with any echo worthy of the name, the words bounced off the walls.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “It was Marilyn Monroe.”

“In a lesbian bar,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe what somebody will tell you, especially as it gets close to closing time. The compliments come thick and fast, and if the woman uttering them has had enough to drink they can get pretty extravagant.”

“I can imagine.”

“And if the recipient of the compliments has had enough to drink, even the most extravagant of those compliments begins to seem reasonable. Now I’ve been on both ends of that particular spectrum, Bern. If I’ve had enough to drink and if I’m sufficiently eager to go home with some sweet young thing, who may not have struck me as that sweet or that young earlier in the evening, well, there’s no limit to the outrageous things I might tell her.”

“I can—”

“Imagine? Well, maybe you can and maybe you can’t, but while you’re at it you can try to imagine some of the verbal bouquets that have been tossed in my direction when it’s my turn to be the sweet young thing. What’s the line, ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer day?’ Well, I’ve been compared to plenty of summer days in my time, and a few April evenings, and I’ve been drunk enough to believe that the particular hot number sitting next to me not only believed I was beautiful but that she was right.”

Maddeningly, I can imagine was the only phrase that came to mind, but I was damned if I was going to trot it out again.

“But in all the dyke bars in all the boroughs in New York,” she said, “nobody ever tried to tell me I looked like Marilyn Monroe.”

“I never said you looked like her, Carolyn.”

“You said—”

“I said something about the way you stretched reminded me of her pose in a particular photograph.”

“Right. I’m short enough for Ray Kirschmann’s smartass remarks to go over my head, and somebody who wasn’t looking to go home with me once told me I was built like a fire hydrant, and my hair is dark and I keep it short, and half the time I walk around smelling like wet dog, so why wouldn’t I remind you of the world’s foremost blonde bombshell?”

“Look,” I said, “I’m sorry.”

“You’re sorry?” There was a glint in her eye, the hint of a smile on her lips. “Bern, you paid me a more outrageous compliment than I ever got in Paula’s or the Duchess. That’s nothing to apologize for.”

“Well, you’re a very attractive woman.”

I could tell she was about to deflect the compliment, but instead she let herself take it in, and glowed a little.

Then she straightened up and said, “That’s very sweet of you. It’s probably the nicest thing anybody ever said to me who wasn’t a drunk lesbian looking to get laid. But tonight what I am first and foremost is your henchperson, remember? And don’t we have work to do?”